Sunday, October 21, 2007

If the good old saying "sweet victory" were anything to go by, this weekend has been an exceptionally sweet one. Any victory is well-taken, but none more so than a championship victory. I have experienced, in different ways, three of these so-called victories this weekend alone.

It all started early yesterday morning with the South African ACM Intercollegiate Programming Contest regional contest. Out of 66 teams nation-wide, UCT claimed the top spot for the sixth year running. And this is destined to continue for the years to come, as even though this will be this year's winning team's last contest, we have many more teams coming through eagerly vying for that taste of glory.

To put it briefly for you, UCT swiped all four top places from the rest of the country! And if that weren't bad enough, due in part to our excellent record in the past we managed to gather a record 22 teams from UCT to participate. This formed a third of the national teams! The full results are available here, with the top four teams being:

teh_solverers

Timothy Stranex

Migael Strydom

Tamara von Glehn

Bacon & Eggs

Bertus Labuschagne

Ian Tunbridge

Ingrid von Glehn

ʇ|nɐɟƃ3s

Charles Bradshaw

Max Rabkin

Keegan Carruthers-Smith

Bit Chow Down

Christian Geist

Dave Jacka

Ashley Reid

I'm in the process of writing up a lengthy post on the contest, but with the latest victory that just cropped up I couldn't resist combining all three.

The sight of victory:

The second victory happened over in Paris, where we repeated what we last did on that memorable day back in 1995. While this victory will never be just as glorious as the first, it will always be remembered as a huge success. I tend to put a lot of the success on the shoulders of Jake White, which is why I feel it is a huge upset that he is leaving and mostly due to the poor management in this country's sport.

If you don't watch rugby at all you will be a bit lost. The South African rugby team took the William Webb Ellis trophy along with the rugby world cup champions role away from defending champions in the final, beating them 15-6 in fairly convincing style. The streets were wild apparently, although I was sane enough to remain indoors.

The sight of victory:

These two above were fairly expected results. UCT has dominated the ACM ICPC for the past six years and South Africa had already creamed The Pommies 36-0 in a group match just five weeks ago. This last one, however, required half a miracle to achieve. The odds were so low that I personally had written it off.

Before the final race of the Formula 1 season this evening, Kimi Raikonnen was seven points behind championship leader Lewis Hamilton, with a maximum ten points up for grabs. Hamilton's teammate, Fernando Alonso, was even closer with just a four point margin. The odds against Kimi winning the championship in the final race were awfully low.

However, a combination of mechanical faults, driver error and poor choice of strategy pushed Hamilton all the way back into 7th giving him only two points. With him out the way, Kimi and Massa ran away with an awesome 1-2 Ferrari victory leaving Alonso trailing 57 seconds behind in 3rd. So it couldn't have ended any tighter. Kimi ends the season on 110 points, with Hamilton and Alonso tying on 109 points each! Simply amazing!